Cesium Design Tiler Now Supports IFC Metadata
The Cesium Design Tiler now preserves metadata from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) when tiling into 3D Tiles. This capability has been a popular request from our community and will enable new workflows in architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) projects combining the built and natural environment in a 3D geospatial context.
Metadata support includes IFC attributes, property sets, and properties. Property sets are groups of related properties displayed under a common heading. When IFC data is converted into 3D Tiles, this common heading is prepended to the name of each property in the set, ensuring a unique name for each property within the tileset.
IFC attributes, property sets, and properties within 3D Tiles. Data source: BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International—accessible via GitHub.
Users can combine IFC metadata with styling and filtering in CesiumJS to show and hide content based on properties such as IFC class name, globally unique identifier (GUID), or other fields. This enhanced interactivity enables users to focus on the most relevant elements of a complex design model.
Filtering model content based on IFC class name and GUID in CesiumJS. Data source: BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International—accessible via GitHub.
IFC metadata can also be used to shade content based on length, area, volume, and other properties. Shading helps AECO project stakeholders visualize and understand the underlying metadata, so they get the insights they need from the model.
Color ramp shading based on an IFC length property in Cesium for Unreal. Data source: BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International—accessible via GitHub.
The Design Tiler is available via Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.6, and we’ll share its performance in an upcoming blog post.
Create a Cesium ion account and upload your IFC data to unlock the potential of your design data as 3D Tiles.